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Massachusetts attorney general Maura Healey today announced settlements of her investigations of two large for-profit college chains for unfair and deceptive student recruiting practices. Kaplan will pay $1.375 million to former students, and Lincoln Tech will pay out about $1 million.

Instead of being a model for how a predatory for-profit could become a non-profit, as the Department of Education had publicly hoped, so far ECMC looks like a pioneer in running a predatory non-profit.

Mr. Hansen is fighting to see that some of the same students enrolled on the basis of such abuses can be socked with enormous collection fees that will go in his company's coffers. Of course, Hansen isn't coming up with all his ideas himself.

Recently, Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, and Under Secretary Ted Mitchell held a conference call discussing the Department's plans for debt relief for Corinthian College students as well as to discuss holding other predatory schools accountable.

Gunderson's letter, co-signed by APSCU's board chair, Roger Dalton, Vice President of American National University, opens ominously: "This letter may be as significant as any communication you have received from your Association in many years." The letter paints a dark landscape for the for-profit college sector, and a bleak-ish picture of APSCU's health.

Some of the largest for-profit college companies -- including, last month, DeVry and Kaplan -- have recently left the industry's main trade group. Funded to boost its industry's fortunes, APSCU may instead have contributed to dragging the industry down. Now APSCU itself may be a sinking ship.

Even though the for-profit college industry is now publicly discredited and on the ropes, facing collapsing enrollments, plummeting share prices, and growing federal and state law enforcement investigations, some GOP White House candidates are now brazenly competing for cash in the 2016 for-profit college primary.

I was in northeast Portland over the weekend and decided to stop in at a brewery that Yelp users said not only had good beer but "it's a nonprofit too!" I assumed they just misinterpreted the brewpub's joke about its inadequate revenue. But no.

On Monday, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Under Secretary Ted Mitchell had a conference call for reporters to announce the Department's plans to offer debt relief for students from the now-collapsed, predatory Corinthian Colleges.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan just announced a debt relief package for students who attended schools run by now-bankrupt Corinthian Colleges. In doing so, Duncan sharply attacked for-profit colleges that have engaged in fraudulent acts, and he criticized members of Congress who have blocked reforms to hold the industry accountable.

For those of you who dream of being future doctors, lawyers, financial wizards, architects, or English professors (if there are any of those anymore), you'll still have to pay exorbitantly for years of graduate school or professional training, which means ever more debt to come.

I hope TheDream.US fund and other efforts to invest in the Dreamers do keep growing. But I also hope the leaders of TheDream.US quickly decide that it is being tarnished by including as a participant a college that represents a blatant, unacceptable conflict of interest.

As a front group for the worst actors in higher education, APSCU has no credibility. It does continue to have something bigger: The billions in taxpayer dollars that Washington keeps funneling to predatory colleges. Corinthian's reign is over, but many almost-as-bad companies remain in operation.

The big for-profit colleges were back in court in Washington again this morning, arguing to a federal judge that the Obama Administration did not have the power to subject them to even the most minimal standards of accountability for leaving their students with overwhelming debt.

It's been apparent for years that the for-profit college chain Corinthian systematically deceived and mistreated its students. Less well-understood has been the company's abuse of its workers, many of them hard-working and sincere teachers.

Vin Weber is much more than a Bush campaign advisor. He's a lobbyist who has pressed his former colleagues in Congress on behalf of clients like AT&T, the pharmaceutical trade association PHRMA, student loan giant Sallie Mae, and student debt collection companies Navient and ECMC.